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THE ULTIMATE BELIEF 



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THE 

ULTIMATE BELIEF 



BY 

A. CLUTTON-BROCK 



NEW YORK 

E. P. DUTTON AND COMPANY 

681 FIFTH AVENUE 



1*\ 



"BS2 

CI 



COPTBIGHT, 1916, 
BY 

E. P. DUTTON AND COMPANY 



Printed in the U. S. A. 

M 30 1916 
©CI.A431733 



PREFACE 

V17HEN I began this little book I 
* * meant it for teachers. My object 
was to state very simply certain beliefs about 
the nature of man and of the universe, which, 
as it seems to me, children ought to be 
taught, so that their minds may be protected 
against sophistries old and new. But, as I 
wrote, I found that I was trying to make 
these beliefs more clear to myself. The task 
was more difficult than I had expected, and 
I could not write a simple text-book about 
matters still in dispute and about an issue 
that takes a new form in every generation. 
So I cannot call the book a text-book. It 
is controversial, and on one important point 
it attacks our whole English system of edu- 
cation. Still, I hope that it may be of use 



PREFACE 

to teachers, though little of it could be 
taught directly to children. But there are 
things which we need to teach ourselves in 
one form before we can teach them to our 
children in another; and this war, among 
other things, has convinced me that we in 
England need to teach ourselves first, and 
then our children, a true and coherent philos- 
ophy, if we are to withstand that false and 
coherent philosophy which now possesses the 
mind of Germany and to which she owes 
her fanatical power. Such a philosophy I 
have tried to state as shortly and clearly as 
I could in this book. It is not addressed to 
philosophers, but to everyone who believes 
that it is important to think rightly about 
first principles; and surely the present war 

proves that it is important. 

A. Clutton-Brock. 



Farncombe, Surrey. 
March 2nd, 1916. 



CONTENTS 



Introduction 11 

I. — The Need of Philosophy for All . 20 

II. — The Philosophy of the Spirit . . 31 

III. — The Moral Activity .... 56 

IV. — The Intellectual Activity ... 69 

V. — The iEsTHETic Activity . .. . . 84 

Conclusion . . ... ■.. m >. Ill 



THE ULTIMATE BELIEF 



INTRODUCTION 

A LTHOUGH this little book might 
■*■*■ have been written at any time, yet I 
was provoked to write it by the present war. 
The Germans teach in their schools a cer- 
tain body of doctrine, which the great mass 
of them accept, and upon which they are 
now acting. It has given them unity and a 
great and fanatical strength ; but it has also 
led them into the crimes that we know of. 
We, on the other hand, are taught no body 
of doctrine in our schools, at least none that 
can be called philosophical, and we are 
rather proud of the fact. If philosophy 
leads the Germans into such wickedness, we 
are better without it, we think. But the 
German doctrine has produced its evil effects 

because it is bad philosophy, bad intellectu- 

11 



12 THE ULTIMATE BELIEF 

ally no less than morally; and the fact that 
some thinking is bad is not a reason why we 
should not think at all. The Germans have 
been encouraged by their bad thinking to 
exercise certain virtues perversely and to 
bad ends, but still to exercise them in a man- 
ner which has astonished the world ; while we 
have been little encouraged by thinking, 
good or bad, to exercise any virtues. We 
have our education, but it is not based upon 
any philosophical principles, upon any 
theory of the nature of man or of the uni- 
verse. We have our religion also ; but that, 
again, has little philosophy in it ; and a reli- 
gion without philosophy is a religion without 
consciousness. It may preserve its dogmas, 
but it does not know what those dogmas 
mean. A boy, for instance, is told that there 
is a God and that he ought to love God; 
but behind that is the philosophical ques- 
tion: Why ought he to love God? And un- 



INTRODUCTION 13 

less that is rightly answered, he will try to 
love God for the wrong reason, and will not 
succeed in loving Him at all. He may de- 
ceive himself and believe that he is loving 
God when he is only loving himself. That 
is what happens to people who think that 
they must love God so that they may go to 
Heaven. For it is self-interest that makes 
them wish to go to Heaven ; and you cannot 
love God, or anyone or anything else, from 
self-interest. 

Philosophy alone can teach you why you 
should love God or anyone else, and what is 
the nature of love ; and therefore we cannot 
do without philosophy, however religious we 
may be. Indeed, the more religious we are, 
the more we see the need of philosophy, and 
the need of teaching it to the young from the 
very first. We cannot be good, we cannot 
teach others how to be good, unless we have 
clear ideas about the nature of goodness and 



14 THE ULTIMATE BELIEF 

the reasons why men should be good. To 
tell a child that he should do this or that, 
without making any attempt to tell him why, 
is to teach him that life is a game with arbi- 
trary rules ; and if it is that, it is not worth 
living. 

On that point the Germans have at least 
taught a clear doctrine. They have taught 
their children that they must be good, that 
they must do everything, for the good of 
Germany; and their children have believed 
this and have been astonishingly good ac- 
cording to the German notion of goodness. 
They have been industrious, obedient, and 
self-sacrificing. They have made their coun- 
try the tidiest, the most efficient, the most 
powerful in the world, and an intolerable 
nuisance to all mankind. Clearly, then, their 
notion of goodness is not our notion ; but we 
need to know what our notion is if we are to 
keep our minds free from the contagion of 



INTRODUCTION 15 

theirs. And we have made little effort to 
know what our notion is or to teach it to our 
children. We cannot teach it to them unless 
we know what it is, unless we know what 
we believe about the mind of man, about the 
purpose of his life, and about the nature of 
the universe. Without this knowledge our 
teaching must be dull and incoherent and 
unconvincing, and our children will rebel 
against it, as, indeed, they often do. There 
is in England a great deal of blind rebellion 
and wasteful reaction among the young. We 
are rather proud of that; but we have no 
reason to be. If we taught them what is 
true, it would be well for them to learn it 
and believe it. If we have not taught them 
what is true, we had better not have taught 
them at all. Rebellion always means error, 
either in the rebel or in that against which 
he rebels; and it is therefore at best a pis 
alter. The test of good teaching is that it 



16 THE ULTIMATE BELIEF 

shall be believed and shall benefit those who 
believe it. German teaching is good in that 
it is believed, but bad in that it does not ben- 
efit those who believe it. Our teaching is 
bad in that it commonly appears incredible 
to the more intelligent of the young; and it 
appears incredible to them because there is 
no coherence or consistency in it. 

I am not myself a teacher; but I have 
been taught myself, and I remember my own 
blind reactions against what I was taught. 
Looking back at them, it seems to me that 
I rebelled because I was never told, no ef- 
fort was made to tell me, why I should love 
knowledge or beauty or righteousness. I 
was merely told that I must learn my les- 
sons and obey certain rules of conduct, and 
I concluded that I must do so for the con- 
venience of my teachers and because they 
would make it unpleasant for me if I did 
not. This, no doubt, was partly my fault. 



INTRODUCTION 17i 

I might have seen the connection between 
their teaching and my own spiritual desires ; 
but they also might have made this connec- 
tion plain to me. As it was, I had to dis- 
cover for myself, slowly, clumsily, and pain- 
fully, what I now believe about the mind of 
man, about the purpose of his life, and about 
the nature of the universe. 

In this book I have tried to state these 
beliefs shortly and clearly. I do not pretend 
that they are original; I hope rather that 
they are what most men believe and what 
most teachers would wish to teach. Only 
they are so seldom stated or taught that few, 
I think, can be fully conscious of them. The 
war and the crimes of the German people 
have made me wish to be fully conscious of 
my beliefs, and I have noticed the same wish 
in many others, young and old. We all 
know that there is a philosophy behind the 
German conduct, a false philosophy which 



!l8 THE ULTIMATE BELIEF 

they have been taught for national ends. 
What philosophy are we to believe and to 
teach, so that we may not fall into their er- 
ror, and so that we may escape from the er- 
rors and weaknesses peculiar to ourselves? 
We in England, for the last generation and 
more, have been neither learners nor teach- 
ers to much effect. This evil has come upon 
the world without our having much share in 
it or against it. We have hid our talent in 
a napkin, and neither led nor misled man- 
kind. Now we see that we cannot remain 
in this negative state. We must believe 
either what the Germans believe or some- 
thing positively and splendidly contrary to 
it. We must have a philosophy of our own 
and one that we can teach to our children. 

Such a philosophy I have tried to state, 
not as it can be taught to children, but as it 
can be clearly understood by teachers, who 
will know, better than I can, how to teach 



INTRODUCTION 19 

it. If they believe it, and act upon it, it 
must affect their method of teaching as well 
as what they teach; but method is a matter 
for them, not for me who have no experience 
in teaching. 

Those who know the ^Esthetic of Bene- 
detto Croce will see that I have learnt much 
from him about aesthetics. They will also 
see, perhaps, that at one point I depart from 
his teaching. But of this I am not quite 
sure myself. It may be that I am only 
drawing conclusions that he would draw. In 
any case, I wish to acknowledge my indebt- 
edness to him. 



THE NEED OF PHILOSOPHY FOR ALL 

"V/fOST people in England think of a 
«*-*-*• philosopher as one who talks in a 
difficult language about matters which are 
of interest only to philosophers. But Phi- 
losophy is concerned with what must interest 
every human being, with the nature of man 
and the nature of the universe. Every man 
is born a philosopher, but often the philoso- 
pher is suppressed in him by the hand-to- 
mouth thinking needed for the struggle for 
life. So boys are often more philosophical 
than men, pupils than their teachers; and 
what they miss in their lessons, without 
knowing it, is philosophy. It is the lack of 
philosophy which makes education uninter- 
esting to them and which causes them to re- 

20 



NEED OF PHILOSOPHY FOR ALL 21 

bel against it. They want to know why 
they should be good, why they should love 
knowledge; and no one tells them why. 
They may not actually ask philosophical 
questions either of their teachers or of them- 
selves ; but there is a philosophical curiosity 
unsatisfied in their minds which causes them 
to be unsatisfied with all that they are 
taught. Just as they learn Latin grammar 
without knowing why, so they learn con- 
duct without knowing why ; and always they 
want to know why. They seek a reason why 
they should do what they are told to do, and 
it is not given to them. 

If you ask the teacher why he does not 
give a reason, he will answer, perhaps, either 
that there is no need to give a reason, since 
every human being knows that he ought to 
do what is right, or else that it would be 
impossible to make boys or girls understand 
philosophy. But both of these answers really 



22 THE ULTIMATE BELIEF 

mean the same thing, namely, that he him- 
self has lost his natural interest in philosophy 
and with it his power of teaching philosophy. 
He cannot teach philosophy if he has none ; 
he cannot make that plain to others which is 
not plain to himself; and he is naturally 
tempted to think that there is no need to 
teach that which he cannot teach. 

But the example of Germany proves that 
there is a need to teach philosophy. The 
German boy is given a reason why he should 
be good and why he should love knowledge. 
He is told that he must do everything to 
increase the glory and power of Germany. 
That is bad philosophy, but it is philosophy. 
It gives him the wrong reason, but it does 
give him a reason; and the consequence is 
that he does learn far more willingly and 
thoroughly than the English boy learns. 
The world is to him intelligible, even if he 
understands it wrongly, whereas to the Eng- 



NEED OF PHILOSOPHY FOR ALL 23 

lish boy it is unintelligible. The German 
philosophy has had such evil results that 
there is a danger lest we should be con- 
firmed in our neglect of all philosophy. But 
the remedy for bad philosophy is not no 
philosophy at all, but good philosophy. Men 
and boys are of such a nature that they need 
reasons for doing whatever they are told to 
do ; and if they fail to find the right reasons 
they find the wrong ones. 

We think that we can go through life 
without any philosophy at all; but there we 
are in error. By the very process of living 
and acting we come to hold certain beliefs 
about our own nature and the nature of the 
universe, although we may never state these 
beliefs to ourselves. Thus, if a man's main 
object in life is to get money, he will come 
to believe that nothing is so well worth hav- 
ing as money, and all his other beliefs will 
become consistent with that belief. We are 



M THE ULTIMATE BELIEF 

generally agreed that a man's main object 
should not be to get money; but how many 
of our teachers could explain clearly and 
convincingly to their pupils what object he 
should have in life and why? The German 
teacher would tell his pupils that their main 
object in life should be to make Germany 
strong, and he seems able to convince his 
pupils of that. The Germans despise our 
education because our teachers seem unable 
to convince their pupils of anything; and 
they have some reason for their contempt. 
We may not teach a false philosophy as they 
do, but we teach no philosophy at all; and 
the consequence is that many of us acquire a 
false philosophy without knowing it. If the 
great evil in Germany is the conscious wor- 
ship of Germany, the great evil in England 
is the unconscious worship of money, and 
against that our boys and girls have no 
philosophical protection whatever. 



NEED OF PHILOSOPHY FOR ALL 25 

They have, it may be said, a religious pro- 
tection; but religion itself is at the mercy 
of a false philosophy. Often the money- 
grubber believes himself to be a religious 
man; and his religion may be, theologically, 
much the same as the religion of St. Fran- 
cis. Yet, because his philosophy is differ- 
ent, his idea of God and his reasons for obey- 
ing God will be different. Obedience to him 
will be, what it was not to St. Francis, a 
sound investment. 

I was once present at a service for City 
clerks held by an American evangelist. He 
prayed that many of those present might, 
that day, lay the basis of a successful commer- 
cial career by finding Christ. He differed 
from St. Francis philosophically rather than 
theologically, and he had managed to make 
his religion quite consistent with his philoso- 
phy. If he did not think that Mammon could 
give men an introduction to God, he did 



26 THE ULTIMATE BELIEF 

think that God could give men an introduc- 
tion to Mammon. The virtues to him were 
all paying virtues; and what paid in this 
world would pay in the next. 

There is always a consistency between our 
ideas of this world and of another ; and it is 
philosophy, not theology, which determines 
our ideas of both. Therefore we need philos- 
ophy as well as religion ; or rather philosophy 
is a part of religion, and our religion cannot 
be right unless our philosophy is right, as 
that American evangelist proved. To teach 
a boy religion without philosophy is to teach 
him mere mythology which he can do what 
he likes with. You tell him that there is a 
God and that he must obey the will of God; 
but, unless you tell him why, he may think 
that he must obey the will of God so that 
he may go to Heaven. It is philosophy 
which tells him why, and you must have a 
philosophy before you can tell him why. 



NEED OF PHILOSOPHY FOR ALL 27 

But in the love of God is implied a love 
of other things, not himself, and philosophy 
tells him why he should love these also. Its 
effort, indeed, the great effort of philosophy 
for the last 2,000 years and more, is to ex- 
plain why we should love things other than 
ourselves and what things we should love, 
and this effort has not been in vain. There 
is a philosophy which does explain this so 
that we can understand it, which appeals to 
our experience like any other science. For 
philosophy is science or it is nothing; it is, 
indeed, the one science which everybody 
needs and without which we are ignorant of 
essential knowledge. 

And yet philosophy does not seem to have 
established any truth as surely as some 
truths have been established by the natural 
sciences. No man is listened to who tells us 
that the earth is flat, but we do listen to 
those who tell us that we can really love 



28 THE ULTIMATE BELIEF 

nothing and value nothing but ourselves. 
The great effort of philosophy is still op- 
posed by men called philosophers, and, what 
is more, the mass of men do not know what 
this effort has accomplished. To them philo- 
sophical questions are all open questions; 
and they believe that this is so because of 
the failure of philosophy to prove anything. 
But it is not philosophy that has failed; 
rather it is men who have failed to do that 
by which alone they can be convinced. 
Philosophy is a science, and its truths can 
only be confirmed by experiment. But, 
whereas to confirm a truth of botany it is 
necessary only to make experiments upon 
plants, to confirm a truth of philosophy we 
must make experiments upon ourselves. 
Thus, if philosophy tells us what we ought 
to value, we can only test the truth of it by 
valuing that which it tells us to value. We 
must make an experiment in valuing; and 



NEED OF PHILOSOPHY FOR ALL 29 

we must make it in action as well as in 
thought or feeling. If, for instance, a man 
values money more than anything else, he 
will act in accordance with his values; his 
one object in life will be to get money. So, 
when philosophy tells him that there are 
other things more valuable than money, he 
must alter his whole way of living, if he is 
to test the truth of that philosophy by ex- 
periment ; and this he will often refuse to do. 
That is why certain truths of philosophy, 
though they may have been confirmed by 
experiment in the lives of all good and wise 
men, are not universally accepted. There is 
a philosophy which might say of itself: "To 
this end was I born, and for this cause came 
I into the world, that I should bear witness 
unto the truth. Everyone that is of the 
truth heareth my voice." We know what 
answer Pilate made to these words. He 
asked: "What is truth?" and, as Bacon says, 



SO THE ULTIMATE BELIEF 

would not stay for an answer. If he had 
listened to the answer and believed it, he 
would have been forced to alter his whole 
way of life. Rather than do that he be- 
lieved that truth was not to be found. But 
truth remains truth, even though men ask 
what it is and will not stay for an answer; 
and to those who hear it and act upon it, it 
proves itself to be truth. 



II 

THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE SPIRIT 

THERE is a truth about the nature of 
man and the nature of the universe 
which philosophy has established with the 
thought of centuries, and which philosophy 
alone can state clearly. This truth can be 
taught to all and should be known by all. 
It can be taught gradually to children from 
their earliest years; and they will be con- 
vinced by it the more they are taught it and 
the more they act upon it. It makes educa- 
tion intelligible because it makes life intelli- 
gible; and it is welcomed by every unper- 
verted mind because it answers to the de- 
sires of that mind, to the desires of what we 
call the spirit. 

31 



32 THE ULTIMATE BELIEF 

Spirit is a name given by philosophy to 
that part of us which has certain desires that 
are not desires of the flesh. Spirit is known 
by its desires, which are different from those 
of the flesh and can only be satisfied by dif- 
ferent means. So there is a philosophy of 
the spirit which asserts the supremacy of 
the spirit and which has established the truth 
about the nature of man and the nature of 
the universe, a truth which every man can 
confirm for himself by his own experiments. 
The philosophy of the spirit tells us that the 
spirit desires three things and desires these 
for their own sake and not for any further 
aim beyond them. It desires to do what is 
right for the sake of doing what is right ; to 
know the truth for the sake of knowing the 
truth; and it has a third desire which is not 
so easily stated, but which I will now call the 
desire for beauty without giving any further 
explanation of it ( an attempt at an explana- 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE SPIRIT 33 

tion will be found on p. 84 seq. . These 
three desires, and these alone, are the de- 
sires of the spirit; and they differ from all 
our other desires in that they are to be pur- 
sued for their own sake, and can, indeed, 
only be pursued for their own sake. If they 
are pursued for some ulterior end, they 
change their nature. If, for instance, I aim 
at goodness, so that I may profit by it, it is 
no longer goodness that I aim at, but profit. 
I may do what is right, but I do it for the 
sake of something else which I value more 
than doing what is right. I might do what is 
wrong for the sake of this something else, if 
it seemed to me that I could better achieve 
my purpose so. So if I try to discover the 
truth that I may profit by it, I am really 
aiming, not at the truth, but at my own 
profit. And my aim would lead me to be- 
lieve what is untrue, if I thought that I 
should profit by that belief. 



34 THE ULTIMATE BELIEF 

In fact, the only way to discover truth is 
to seek it for its own sake, and the only way 
to do what is right is to do it for its own 
sake. 

So the spirit has three activities, and three 
alone, as it has three desires; namely, the 
moral, the intellectual, and the aesthetic ac- 
tivities. And man lives so that he may exer- 
cise these three activities of the spirit, and 
for no other reason. Every other theory of 
life, however it may be presented, amounts 
to this — that man lives so that he may live — 
and is incessantly contradicted by all the 
higher values and activities of man. It can- 
not be explained why these values and ac- 
tivities seem to man higher, if they are really 
subsidiary to the mere business of living. 
But the philosophy of the spirit says that 
the business of living is subsidiary to them, 
and that man can only satisfy himself in his 
life if he lives so that he may exercise the 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE SPIRIT 35 

activities of the spirit and not so that he 
may go on living. 

This is not a mere theological dogma pre- 
tending to be philosophy. It is the result of 
experience and it appeals to experience. It 
has been discovered by experiment that men 
can be good, can understand the nature of 
goodness, only if they aim at goodness for 
its own sake. There is in them a desire for 
goodness which can be satisfied only by the 
pursuit of goodness for its own sake. And 
so it is with truth. But experience also 
shows that the opposite is true of those activ- 
ities which are not spiritual. They must 
always be means and not ends, and means to 
our spiritual activities; and we only pursue 
them well or get what we want from them if 
we pursue them as means. Thus if we live 
for the sake of living, we do not live well 
and are not satisfied with our lives. To live 
for the sake of living will not teach us how 



36 THE ULTIMATE BELIEF 

to live. A man should take care of his 
health that he may the better exercise his 
spiritual activities. If he takes care of his 
health for the sake of his health, he will think 
so much about it that he will become un- 
healthy. So, too, he should eat that he may 
the better exercise his spiritual activities. If 
he eats for the sake of eating, he will eat too 
much, and so injure both his body and his 
mind and become incapable even of the 
pleasure of eating. 

All this, perhaps, will seem commonplace 
to the reader. But I would ask him, espe- 
cially if he is a teacher, to note the fact that 
there are three activities of the spirit ; all of 
them, because they are activities of the spirit, 
to be exercised equally for their own sake. 
This is the fact which is commonly ignored 
in our education and in our philosophy, so 
far as we have one ; and because it is ignored 
our education fails to satisfy those who are 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE SPIRIT 37 

taught, and our philosophy fails to satisfy 
ourselves. The common belief of most teach- 
ers and moralists in England is that there is 
only one activity of the spirit, the moral — 
that we must do good for the sake of doing 
good and for no other reason — but that the 
intellectual and aesthetic activities are sub- 
sidiary to the moral, and not really spiritual 
at all. It is implied, if not actually taught, 
in most of our education that truth is to be 
sought because it is useful, and that beauty is 
to be produced or experienced because it 
gives pleasure. The moralist, if he is really 
a moralist, rightly assumes both utility and 
pleasure to be subsidiary to righteousness; 
but he is wrong when he tests truth by its 
usefulness, or beauty by the pleasure which 
it gives. The intellectual activity often is 
useful, and so is the moral; but neither can 
be rightly exercised if utility is their aim. 
The aesthetic activity often does give pleas- 



38 THE ULTIMATE BELIEF 

ure, but so does the intellectual; yet neither 
can be rightly exercised if pleasure is their 
aim. Not one of the three spiritual activities 
is itself, unless it is exercised for its own 
sake. And unless we understand this fact 
we cannot exercise the spiritual activities 
nor teach others to exercise them. 

The great defect of English thought, 
which is a result of our lack of philosophy, 
is that we are always apt to think of every- 
thing in terms of something else, and to 
believe that we have explained it when we 
have thought of it in terms of something else. 
Thus, when we say that honesty is the best 
policy, we are thinking of it in terms of some- 
thing else, commending it, not as honesty, 
but as expediency. But honesty is not ex- 
pediency ; it is a moral quality, simply itself, 
and to be desired for itself ; and if you think 
of it as expediency, you cease to know what 
it is. So if you tell a boy that honesty is the 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE SPIRIT 39 

best policy, you tell him what is often un- 
true. He finds out for himself soon enough 
that it is not always the best policy; and he 
may prefer policy to honesty, because he 
has never been taught what honesty is, nor 
why he should prefer it to dishonesty. What 
he needs to be taught is that there is in him 
a spirit which desires honesty for its own 
sake and not for any other reason whatever. 
This is a fact about his own nature of which 
education should make him fully conscious, 
and which he can prove to himself by experi- 
ment. If he will try to be honest for the 
sake of honesty, he will find that the spirit in 
him is satisfied ; but it never will be satisfied 
by any kind of morality pursued for any 
other reason. If he thinks of morality in 
terms of something else, it will cease to be 
morality to him, and his spirit will not be 
satisfied with it. 

We know that it is immoral to think of 



40 THE ULTIMATE BELIEF 

morals in terms of something else, although 
we constantly tend to do so; but we shall 
never escape from that tendency until we 
recognise the other activities of the spirit, 
and understand that, because they are activi- 
ties of the spirit, they cannot be subordinate 
even to each other. We must realise, and 
teach, that the value of truth is absolute no 
less than the value of goodness, and that 
the value of beauty is as absolute as the 
value of the other two. This is not a mere 
theory to be argued about by philosophers. 
It is a plain fact of immediate importance to 
everyone, and therefore to be taught in all 
education. Unless I value truth for its own 
sake I cannot discover truth. Unless I value 
beauty for its own sake I cannot see or hear 
or in any way experience beauty. The 
moralist may wish that it should be other- 
wise; but he cannot alter the nature of the 
universe or the mind of man to suit his own 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE SPIRIT 41 

purposes. It is part of his moral problem to 
face the facts of life, and if he teaches others 
that the facts are what they are not, he is 
behaving immorally for the sake of morals ; 
which means that he is ceasing to understand 
the nature of morals. 

It is a fact that, if I try to discover the 
truth for some moral end, I shall probably 
fail to discover it. My further aim will pre- 
vent me from seeing things as they are, and 
I shall see them as I wish to see them for 
moral purposes. So it is a fact that I cannot 
experience beauty for some moral end. The 
further aim actually hinders the experience, 
and this is still more clear when we come to 
the production of beauty in works of art. If 
the artist tries to produce a work of art so 
that he may make others good, it is not a 
work of art that he produces. There is in 
all of us an intellectual and an aesthetic con- 
science, as well as a moral conscience; and 



42 THE ULTIMATE BELIEF 

if I want to be intellectually or aesthetically 
right, I must obey the intellectual or the 
aesthetic conscience, just as I must obey the 
moral conscience if I want to be morally 
right. All conscience is of the spirit and is 
to be obeyed because it is of the spirit, and 
without any ulterior aim. All the values of 
the spirit are absolute values ; and unless we 
value absolutely all that the spirit tells us 
to value, we fail to value life or the universe 
itself. The universe is to be valued because 
there is truth in it and beauty in it ; and we 
live to discover the truth and the beauty no 
less than to do what is right. Indeed, we 
cannot attain to that state of mind in which 
we shall naturally do what is right unless we 
are aware of the truth and the beauty of the 
universe. The moral faculty only works 
rightly when it is enriched and directed by 
the other two faculties of the spirit, each 
exercised for its own sake. 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE SPIRIT 43 

Thus a man who does not believe in the 
absolute value of truth will fail in sincerity 
because of his disbelief. It is a fact that, 
if we are to be good, we must exercise our 
intellectual faculties to the best of our abil- 
ity. It is true, of course, that a man may be 
good without having a great intellect by 
nature. It is the exercise of his intellect, 
rather than its original capacity, which af- 
fects his goodness. It is an instrument to be 
used, and used rightly, and if it is not rightly 
used, it will be wrongly used, and so injure 
his whole character. That is the moral of the 
parable about the talents. The man who hid 
his talent in a napkin refused to use his intel- 
lect rightly and was therefore condemned 
morally. But the intellect can only be used 
rightly in the pursuit of truth for its own 
sake. Truth is what the intellectual activity 
does naturally aim at. It is an appetite for 
truth, just as the moral activity is an appe- 



44 THE ULTIMATE BELIEF 

tite for goodness ; and if it is perverted from 
its proper aim, it is perverted altogether, 
and perverts the moral activity also. 

Everyone does instinctively feel that there 
is some kinship between goodness, truth, and 
beauty. The philosophy which insists upon 
that kinship is not mere empty theorising; 
it is based upon the universal experience of 
mankind, and attempts to emphasise and 
explain a fact of that experience. We do 
feel always that there is something good in 
truth, something beautiful in goodness, some- 
thing true in beauty. And the reason is that 
all three are the aim of spiritual activities, 
all three are desired for their own sake and 
not as means to something else. Directly we 
attempt to desire any of them as means to 
something else, we cease to desire them and 
cease to be aware of their true nature. 

It is the failure to recognise this fact 
which spoils so much moral education and 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE SPIRIT 45 

which causes the young to rebel against it. 
The young, in their inexperience, may not be 
aware of the great practical importance of 
the moral activity. But this very inexperi- 
ence makes them often more aware than 
their elders of the absolute value of the intel- 
lectual and aesthetic activities. They have 
not, of course, a conscious philosophic theory 
of their absolute value, but often they do 
passionately feel their absolute value; and 
when they are taught that the moral activity 
alone has an absolute value, they rebel 
against that teaching. And they are right; 
for those other activities of the spirit which 
they feel working in themselves have also, 
each, their own absolute value; and if they 
are denied and thwarted and starved, the 
spirit itself is starved with them. It is the 
spirit which rebels against the denial of the 
absolute value of all its faculties, and this 
rebellion is often mistaken both by the young 



46 THE ULTIMATE BELIEF 

themselves and by their elders for a rebel- 
lion against morals. 

What is needed, therefore, is not merely 
a moral education, which by itself fails to 
satisfy the young, but an education of the 
spirit and of all three spiritual activities. 
The young should be told that they have all 
three spiritual faculties and that all three 
must be exercised for their own sake. Spir- 
itual education is an education in moral, 
intellectual, and esthetic disinterestedness. 
It must insist upon the fact that the aim of 
life is to exercise each of these faculties for 
its own sake, and that a man who does not 
so exercise them is not living at all. It may 
also point out that in practice the moral 
faculty needs to be more constantly exer- 
cised than the other two, but it should point 
out also that the moral faculty cannot be 
properly exercised if the other two are 
starved, that we must answer to the call of 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE SPIRIT 47 

each when we hear it, that we must obey our 
intellectual and our aesthetic consciences if 
we are also to obey our moral conscience. 

In every human being there is the desire 
for the exercise of all three faculties. Edu- 
cation should make him fully conscious of 
that desire and should encourage him to 
value it, as a desire of the spirit, above all 
the desires of the flesh. And it should do 
this, not merely by a series of arbitrary com- 
mands, but by an explanation to him of his 
own spiritual nature, a philosophical expla- 
nation expressed as plainly as possible, and 
appealing constantly to his own experience. 

The young are often uncertain in their 
values through lack of experience, and 
therefore apt to be ashamed of what is best 
in them. A boy will be ashamed of his own 
desire for goodness, or beauty, or truth, of 
his own natural love of these things; and 
ridicule will easily induce him to hide or 



48 THE ULTIMATE BELIEF 

suppress it. This ridicule has the more 
power over him because he is uncertain of 
himself, because he does not know himself. 
He is fond of poetry, perhaps, and another 
boy tells him that poetry is "all rot." That 
opinion seems to him to be the opinion of the 
world, and he supposes that he has a private 
weakness for poetry, that the poets them- 
selves are only oddities like him playing a 
poor sort of game in which sensible people 
can take no interest. And the worst of it 
is that his very teachers often seem to hold 
the same opinion. To them, also, poetry is 
not business, or it is only business when 
written in Latin or Greek, so that boys may 
learn those languages from it. So the boy 
who loves poetry comes to think of himseli* 
as a peculiar person in a hostile and stupid 
world. He hides his love from the world as 
if it were a guilty secret; but at the same 
time he prides himself on it, and very likely 



tTHE PHILOSOPHY OF THE SPIRIT 49 

becomes a prig. Or he discovers with sur- 
prise, when he knows the world better, that 
many people love poetry, many even of his 
own school-fellows. He is not a peculiar 
person at all; and if only he had known that 
as a boy, he would have been both happier 
himself and more agreeable to others. As 
he did not know it, the secrecy of his love 
for poetry made it morbid and fanatical, 
and it takes him years to throw off this 
morbidity, if he ever throws it off. 

But it should be part of the schoolmaster's 
business, and of the parent's, to explain that 
the love of poetry is natural to the spirit and 
not peculiar to a few oddities ; that a boy is 
neither foolish nor remarkable because he 
loves poetry, or because he loves truth, or 
because he loves goodness. The schoolmas- 
ter and the parent are apt to be afraid of 
extreme spiritual enthusiasm in the young. 
They think it is unhealthy, and it often is 



50 THE ULTIMATE BELIEF 

unhealthy, because the enthusiast seems to 
himself a peculiar person with all the world 
against him. The cure for this unhealthi- 
ness is not an occasional silly joke at his en- 
thusiasm, but to explain to him its nature 
and value and to make him see that it is not 
peculiar to himself. Nothing is more strange 
in our schools, and in our whole society, than 
the immense conspiracy, mostly unconscious, 
which is maintained to ignore the natural 
activities of the spirit. We have a kind of 
false shame, almost a kind of prudery, about 
them. If we talk about them at all it is with 
hushed voices, or with forced facetiousness, 
as if we were talking of something indecent. 
We ought to talk about them as about other 
plain matters of fact, and to assume that 
they are just as interesting to everyone as 
money-making. For that is the truth about 
them; they are plain matters of fact and 
universally interesting, much more interest- 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE SPIRIT 51 

ing than the matters about which we do talk 

seriously. 
This false shame, this prudery of ours, is 

the result of our ignorance of the philosophy 

of the spirit. We never put it clearly to our- 
selves that the activities of the spirit are to 
be pursued for their own sake, and that in 
every man there is a spirit which desires to 
pursue them for their own sake. We think 
that these activities are not business ; but that 
is just what they are, the proper business of 
all mankind, not of a few elect or idle. But, 
not understanding this, we think that we our- 
selves are elect or idle when we exercise 
these activities ; and we teach our children to 
think the same. So there has grown up 
among us, at least among the well-to-do, a 
tiresome frivolity about these activities which 
is supposed to be a mark of education and 
which is really a mark of false shame. We 
have in particular a tiresome frivolity about 



52 THE ULTIMATE BELIEF 

morals, which is, no doubt, an unconscious 
reaction against the notion that the spirit is 
concerned with morals alone. We feel that 
a man who takes only morals seriously is 
over-serious; whereas, really, his seriousness 
is too narrow. We need to be completely 
serious about all the activities of the spirit, 
because they are to be pursued for their own 
sake, and about nothing else. And true 
humour is a recognition of the fact that 
nothing else is completely serious compared 
with these activities. It is a criticism of mis- 
applied seriousness, in ourselves or in others ; 
and the glory of it is that it explodes all 
bugbear or sham seriousness with the sudden 
revelation of laughter. But there must be 
the real seriousness before the sham can be 
exploded; and so behind all real humour 
there is the philosophy of the spirit. But 
behind the sham humour which laughs at 
morals there is only a confused sense that 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE SPIRIT 53 

morals are made too much of. And so it is 
with the sham humour that laughs at each 
of the other activities of the spirit. It is 
aware of an error, but it does not know what 
the error is, because behind it there is no 
philosophy of the spirit, no recognition of 
the equal seriousness of all three spiritual 
activities. 

Naturally, since it is commonly supposed 
that the only spiritual activity is the moral, 
there are rebels to whom the only spiritual 
activity is the intellectual or the aesthetic. 
They point out the bad morals of those to 
whom morals are everything; and in turn 
their own aesthetic or intellectual failings are 
pointed out. Just as fun is made of the 
moralist, so it is made of the pedant or the 
aesthete; and in each case with justice. You 
must recognise and exercise all three spirit- 
ual activities if you are to exercise any one 
of them quite naturally and rightly. The 



m THE ULTIMATE BELIEF 

conscienceless artist of genius is a figment, 
and so is the philistine saint. A man cannot 
be an artist if he has no conscience, nor can 
he be a saint if he is a philistine. The artist 
must have an artistic conscience ; and there is 
always something of the moral conscience in 
that — enough, at least, to make him see the 
beauty of holiness. So, too, there is always 
enough of the aesthetic conscience in the saint 
to see the holiness of beauty. In fact, each 
conscience is aware of its kinship with the 
other two, and each is itself a way to the 
other two. 

But it ceases to be this if it is narrowly 
and unphilosophically exclusive; and also it 
ceases to be itself. The moralist, if he does 
not recognise the other two spiritual activi- 
ties, inevitably comes to think of morals 
themselves as a means to comfort either in 
this world or the next, because he does not 
know what to do with his morals; the mere 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE SPIRIT 55 

aesthete inevitably becomes a hedonist; the 
mere intellectualist a sophist or a pedant. 
Each is a failure of education, and it is only 
by means of a full and clear philosophy of 
the spirit that we can avoid such failures. 



Ill 

THE MORAL ACTIVITY 

HAVING spoken of the three activities 
of the spirit in general, I shall now 
speak of each of them in particular, and 
first of the moral activity. The moral ac- 
tivity is practical. It is concerned with ac- 
tion and with those states of mind which lead 
to action. A state of mind is judged and 
tested morally according to the action which 
is likely to result from it. It is, in fact, 
judged as part of the process of action and 
seen as one with that process. The moral 
activity consists in doing what is right for 
its own sake; and thought, so far as it is 
subject to the moral activity, is part of 
doing. 

56 



THE MORAL ACTIVITY 57 

There is a desire of the spirit to do what is 
right, and all processes of the mind may be 
controlled by that desire. But the final 
satisfaction of that desire is in action, not in 
thought; and, however right thought may 
be, it cannot be satisfied morally except in 
action. The spirit is profoundly dissatis- 
fied, filled with a sense of impotence, if right 
thinking is accompanied by wrong action. 
For in that case the thinking is baulked of 
its proper results in action. There is a proc- 
ess begun rightly but finished wrongly, or 
rather not finished at all, for the wrong ac- 
tion is not a part of the process, but a con- 
tradiction of it. 

Now in other philosophies many different 
reasons are given why men should do what 
is right, and there is much questioning as to 
how men can know what is right. Some- 
times, indeed, right is discovered to be not 
right at all, but something else, such as en- 



58 THE ULTIMATE BELIEF 

lightened self-interest, or the interest of the 
whole human race. And these philosophies 
are always in difficulties to explain why, if 
right is not really right but something else, 
men should feel that peculiar emotion which 
they do feel about right; why they should 
so passionately value it as right and not as 
something else. There is, of course, the same 
difficulty about men's value for truth and 
for beauty. There is the fact that men do 
value each of these for its own sake, and do 
feel a peculiar emotion about each which is 
the expression of that value, an emotion 
they do not feel about anything which they 
do not value for its own sake. 

But if we accept the philosophy of the 
spirit, we make no attempt to explain away 
these emotions and these values in terms of 
anything else. We say simply that the spirit 
values what is right, what is true, and what 
is beautiful for their own sake. The spirit 



THE MORAL ACTIVITY 59 

has, as it were, an appetite for these, as the 
body has an appetite for food. And just as 
the spirit itself cannot be explained in terms 
of anything else, so they cannot be explained 
in terms of anything else. So we can only 
define what is right as that which the spirit 
desires to do for its own sake, and not for 
any further purpose. When the spirit de- 
sires to do something for its own sake, it de- 
sires to do what is right ; and when we allow 
this desire to be thwarted or contradicted in 
action, we do what is wrong. 

It is, of course, true that we judge our 
actions constantly by their effects upon oth- 
ers. That is because right, to the spirit, is 
doing good, not harm, to others. The de- 
sire of the spirit is to do good to others, for 
the sake of doing good and not for any fur- 
ther reason. Therefore we have to j udge our 
actions by their results ; and we have to take 
thought how we can act so as to do good to 



60 THE ULTIMATE BELIEF 

others, and not harm. But this judging of 
our actions, and this taking thought, is all 
part of the moral activity, all a means to that 
end which is pursued for its own sake. It is 
only the manner in which the desire to do 
what is right accomplishes itself. It is, in 
fact, like the technique of the artist, and it 
cannot rightly be practised except under the 
control of the desire to do what is right for 
its own sake. 

If, for instance, I go about trying to do 
good to others so that they may do good to 
me, or even so that I may enjoy the con- 
sciousness of my own goodness, I am aiming 
really not at their well-being, but at my own. 
And, since I am not aiming at their well- 
being, I shall not accomplish their well-be- 
ing. How am I to know what is best for 
them? I cannot know it except through the 
desire to do what is best for them. And if 
my desire is not to do that, but to do some- 



THE MORAL ACTIVITY 61 

thing which will in some way profit myself, 
I lack the one means by which I can dis- 
cover what is good for them. 

This is not mysticism, but common-sense. 
For if my ultimate aim is my own profit, I 
shall be thinking all the while of that profit, 
and not of what is best for them. I may 
persuade myself, for my own pleasure, that 
my aim is to do what is best for them; but 
if it is not, my action will all the while be 
controlled by my real aim, and I shall fail 
in doing what is best for them, just as an 
artist whose real aim is to make money fails 
in his art. 

In doing good to other people, it is not 
merely the act itself that matters, but the 
manner in which it is done. Or, rather, the 
manner in which it is done is an essential 
part of the action. Thus, to take a crude 
instance, I may give money to a man in 
such a manner that he will hate me for it or 



62 THE ULTIMATE BELIEF 

love me for it. If the result is that he hates 
me, I am not doing good to him at all, though 
I may pride myself on the good I have done. 
So the giving of the money is not the whole 
action; the manner in which it is given is 
also part of the action. But the manner de- 
pends on the spirit in which I give it. If I 
give it so that I may enjoy the consciousness 
of my own generosity, the manner will be 
bad, and the man will hate me rather than 
love me for my gift. I must give it from the 
desire to do good for its own sake — that is to 
say, to do good to him, not to myself, if he 
is to love me for it, if he is to profit by it in 
mind as well as in body. 

We have in our ordinary morality, espe- 
cially as we teach it to the young, fatally 
separated doing good from the reasons why 
we do it. We are not aware that we can 
only do good if we do it for the right reason 
— that is to say, for the sake of doing it. 



THE MORAL ACTIVITY 63 

For that right reason alone will tell us what 
is good. It alone will supply the right man- 
ner to an action without which the action 
itself ceases to be right. A great deal of the 
morality taught to the young insists upon 
the happy consequences of right doing — that 
is to say, upon the happy consequences to 
the doer. The young see through this quick 
enough. They see that the consequences 
are not necessarily happy, and their spirits 
are not satisfied with a morality which in- 
sists upon happy consequences. Hence they 
will often be naughty out of a mere rebellion 
against this commercial morality; and a 
great part of the naughtiness of boys at 
school is really a blind rebellion of the spirit 
against a commercial morality which does 
not satisfy it. 

Boys think it fine to do wrong; they en- 
courage each other in doing wrong ; and have 
an etiquette of conspiracy and disobedience 



64 THE ULTIMATE BELIEF 

against their masters because there is a kind 
of perverse disinterestedness in their wrong- 
doing. At least, they are not doing it for 
reward, and are not consenting to the view 
that action ought to be controlled by the 
hope of reward and the fear of punishment. 
The whole system of reward and punishment 
is distasteful to them, not because of the 
original sin that is in them, but because the 
spirit in them desires to escape from all 
thought of reward and punishment. And 
since they are not taught to do what is right 
for its own sake, they make their escape by 
doing what is wrong for its own sake. To 
them the model boy is disagreeable because 
he is a slave to the system of rewards and 
punishments, because he is incapable of dis- 
interested action of any kind. And if they 
kick him, it is not from mere envy, but be- 
cause they feel that he deserves punishment 
as well as reward. 



THE MORAL ACTIVITY 65 

All, or a great deal of, this perversity 
might be cured if boys could be made to un- 
derstand that they should do what is right 
for the sake of doing it, and that goodness 
consists in that and in nothing else. But 
their natural desire for disinterestedness is 
seldom appealed to. They are told nothing, 
or else something false, about the nature of 
goodness, and often they go through the 
whole of their school-time without ever 
learning anything about it, and with a vague 
notion that goodness is something which 
their masters wish to impose upon them for 
their own convenience. Hence the belief, 
common among clever and spirited youths, 
that morality is all convention; which, in- 
deed, it is, unless it is the result of the moral 
activity of the spirit. 

As to punishment, the reasons for it should 
be made quite plain to children as soon as 
possible, both by their parents and at school. 



66 THE ULTIMATE BELIEF 

It should be explained to them that they are 
not punished because they are wicked or to 
make them good, since they must be good, 
and can only be good, for the sake of good- 
ness, and not so that they may escape pun- 
ishment. They are to be punished so that 
they may be prevented from doing things 
harmful to themselves or to others. Whether 
or not punishment is the best means of pre- 
vention is a question which the parent or 
teacher must settle for himself. But if he 
does punish he should have the right reason 
for doing so and make that reason clear to 
the offender. Above all, he must not punish 
out of moral indignation, or express moral 
indignation to the offender if he punishes 
him. It is far better that he should punish 
out of mere anger, for a boy knows then that 
he is punished because he has made a nui- 
sance of himself, and such punishment warns 
him what will happen to him in life if he 



THE MORAL ACTIVITY 67 

continues to make a nuisance of himself. It 
is an example of the natural reaction of the 
world against those who make nuisances of 
themselves. 

But, in the main, punishment should be 
for breaches of rules. It should be explained 
to the child that rules are made for the gen- 
eral convenience and that a breach of them 
is not a breach of the moral law, but an in- 
convenience. If there is no other way to 
make the child keep them, he must be pun- 
ished, but he, too, should be made to see that 
the punishment is a pis aller, something irra- 
tional in its nature, and necessary only be- 
cause he is irrational. Let him by all means 
be made to understand that it does not pay 
to break rules; but this appeal to his self- 
interest must not be confused with an appeal 
to his moral sense. For he himself will be 
aware of the confusion, even if he cannot 
state it clearly to himself . He will feel that 



68 THE ULTIMATE BELIEF 

an unfair advantage is being taken of him 
and will resent it, probably by breaking 
every rule that he can break without being 
discovered. The spirit exists in him with its 
desire to do right for its own sake, and it is 
merely bewildered and affronted when he is 
told to do right for some other reason. 

Thus all moral education should be based 
upon the assumption that the desire of the 
spirit exists in every child, and the education 
should consist of a strengthening of that de- 
sire and of an effort to make its nature clear 
to the child, so that he may know that he 
desires to do what is right, and for no reason 
except that it is right. He may by other 
means be disciplined into obedience, but he 
will be obeying others and not his own spirit, 
and as soon as the need for obedience is 
gone he will have no guidance except what 
his spirit, confused rather than illuminated 
by education, can give him. 



IV 

THE INTELLECTUAL ACTIVITY 

rpHE intellectual activity of the spirit is 
A concerned, not with action, but with 
thought, and so with thought apart from ac- 
tion. Its aim is to discover the truth about 
things; and though the discovery may, and 
often must, affect action, yet it is made for 
its own sake and not with a view to action. 
So a state of mind is judged, intellectually, 
apart from any action which may result from 
it. When I try to discover the truth about 
anything, I do not ask myself what will be 
the effect of the truth upon my action; still 
less do I test the truth or falsehood of my 
ideas by their possible effect upon my action. 
It is, indeed, impossible that I should do so, 
for, if I try to do so, the idea ceases to be 

69 



70 THE ULTIMATE BELIEF 

true or false to me and becomes merely use- 
ful or harmful. The intellectual desire of 
the spirit is to discover what is true, and it 
cannot be satisfied by discovering what is 
useful. 

This intellectual desire of the spirit exists 
in everyone in greater or less strength, just 
like the moral desire, and its absolute value 
needs to be recognised no less. Indeed, it 
will not be satisfied except with a recognition 
of its absolute value; and there can be no 
healthy and free life of the spirit where it is 
not recognised. 

We know, of course, that the desire for 
truth is of great practical value; all our 
scientific discoveries are the result of it. But 
truth must be an end in itself if it is to be 
discovered, and if all these valuable prac- 
tical results are to be obtained from its dis- 
covery. Truth will not be discovered in a 
society which asks what is the good of it, but 



THE INTELLECTUAL ACTIVITY 71 

only in a society which has a spiritual hun- 
ger for truth. But on this point there is 
often a curious confusion in men's minds. 
They suppose that hunger for the truth is 
only spiritual if there is a moral purpose in 
that hunger, if a man tries to discover the 
truth so that he may do good to other men. 
But a man must try to discover that truth 
for which his spirit hungers, or he will dis- 
cover no truth at all. If his desire is for 
metaphysical truth he must seek that with- 
out asking how it will profit mankind. All 
truth sooner or later will profit mankind; 
but it will be discovered only when men do 
not look beyond it for profit either to them- 
selves or to others. There must be no argu- 
ment about its value. It must be accepted, 
as a fact, that the spirit desires truth for its 
own sake, and that, because it is the spirit, it 
has a right to that desire, just as it has a 
right to the desire for goodness. 



72 THE ULTIMATE BELIEF 

Where this is denied, morals suffer with 
the injury that is done to the intellect. A 
man can be good without being clever, but 
he cannot be good unless he desires the truth 
for its own sake and uses his intellect to dis- 
cover it. The spirit is one, though its activ- 
ities are three, and it suffers if any one of 
these activities is never practised. This does 
not mean, of course, that a man must try to 
discover the truth about everything. It 
means that, whenever he believes anything, 
he must wish to believe what is true, for the 
sake of truth. He may, of course, accept 
what others tell him, but in that case he must 
do so because he trusts them, and not be- 
cause it is easiest, or most comfortable, or 
safest to believe what they tell him. This 
trust must be a real trust in their superior 
knowledge and wisdom, not a slavish accept- 
ance of some common opinion about them. 
The mass of men hold a great many opinions 



THE INTELLECTUAL ACTIVITY 73 

to which they have no right, because they are 
not the result of any search for the truth. 
They believe what they want to believe, and 
their intellect is at the mercy of their preju- 
dices and desires. We can all see this very 
clearly in the case of the Germans now. 
They believe about our conduct and theirs 
just what they want to believe. They be- 
lieve, for instance, that England and 
France, and Belgium herself, all conspired 
together to violate the neutrality of Belgium, 
although it is plain that our one interest in 
that neutrality was to preserve it. They 
could not be so docile in their beliefs if they 
had not been trained to believe what is con- 
venient rather than what is true. And it is 
this docility of theirs, more than any wicked- 
ness, that has caused them to commit their 
national crimes. 

Therefore, one chief aim of education 
should be to insist that truth is always desir- 



74 THE ULTIMATE BELIEF 

able for its own sake, and no matter what its 
consequences may seem to be. It should 
encourage the spiritual desire for truth no 
less than the spiritual desire for goodness. 
It should insist that the function of the in- 
tellect is to discover truth, not to discover 
reasons for doing what we want to do. And 
it should therefore never discourage in the 
learner any desire for truth, however incon- 
venient it may be. A boy should feel that 
his parent or his master has a common in- 
terest with him in discovering the truth, not 
that his elders are in a conspiracy to conceal 
it from him. There is, no doubt, sometimes 
danger in the truth; but there is far more 
danger in the notion that truth does not 
matter, or that men or boys can be good 
without desiring it. For that notion is one 
against which the spirit naturally rebels; 
and a boy whose spirit is starved of the truth 
will often, in reaction, believe that nothing 



THE INTELLECTUAL ACTIVITY 75 

matters but truth, that morals are merely 
imposed upon him by Ms elders for their own 
convenience. Clever boys are often cynics 
because their desire for truth is thwarted, 
and because, in consequence, they value noth- 
ing but the activity of the intellect. They do 
not know what ails them, nor do their elders 
know. The parent and the teacher are often 
impatient of the perversities of the starved 
spirit ; but it is their business not to starve it 
in any of its proper desires. It is their busi- 
ness to make the universe seem intelligible, 
not unintelligible, to the young; to explain 
law, not to lay down rules ; for it is the nat- 
ural instinct of the spirit, in its desire for 
truth, to rebel against rules when they are 
blindly imposed, and this rebellion, however 
much of a nuisance it may be, is necessary to 
the healthy life of any society. It is just 
because there is not enough of it in Germany 
at present, because her young have been 



76 THE ULTIMATE BELIEF 

taught to believe what is supposed to be for 
the good of the nation, because they have not 
revolted against this teaching but have taken 
the good of the nation for an absolute good, 
that the Germans have committed more 
crimes in their docility than any nation has 
ever committed out of sheer lawlessness. 

There is often a confusion in our minds 
between truth-telling, as a matter of morals, 
and the desire of the spirit for truth. A 
man may desire to tell the truth for moral 
reasons, and may pride himself on doing so, 
and yet there may be in him very little desire 
to know the truth. Truth-telling, when it is 
a matter of morals, is action; but the desire 
to know the truth for its own sake belongs 
to thought, and is independent of action, 
independent of our relation with each other. 
Telling the truth, being an expression of the 
moral activity, is controlled by that activity, 
and there are times when the moral activity 



THE INTELLECTUAL ACTIVITY 77 

will not express itself in telling the truth, 
when to tell it is to obey a hard-and-fast 
rule, and not to obey the moral conscience. 
But the desire to know the truth is the intel- 
lectual activity of the spirit. That activity 
desires truth just as the moral activity de- 
sires goodness, and it cannot desire anything 
else. To it truth is the absolute; but truth- 
telling is not the absolute to the moral activ- 
ity. We make a rule to tell the truth be- 
cause we are on our guard against our own 
natural tendency to lie, as an easy way out 
of a difficulty; and this rule is a safeguard 
against our own infirmities. But for them 
we should need no rule at all. So truth-tell- 
ing is a discipline rightly imposed upon the 
young that they may not fall into the bad 
and easy habit of lying. But they ought to 
know that it is a discipline; they ought not 
to confuse it with the intellectual activity of 
the spirit whose desire is to know the truth, 



78 THE ULTIMATE BELIEF 

not to tell it. And it ought to be explained 
to them that, without the desire to know the 
truth for its own sake, they cannot tell the 
truth to any good purpose, nor make use of 
it when it is told to them. 

The phrase, intellectual honesty, shows 
us how closely the moral and intellectual ac- 
tivities of the spirit are connected with each 
other. Indeed, the intellectual is a necessary 
preparation for the moral; without it the 
moral activity loses its sense of direction. 
A man does not need to be clever before he 
be good; but he does need to desire truth 
for its own sake. And the Greeks insisted 
upon this when they said "Know thyself"; 
for a man cannot know himself unless he de- 
sires truth for its own sake. To know your- 
self is the beginning of intellectual honesty, 
and without that there cannot be moral hon- 
esty either. Yet, and this is the point which 
many educators miss, intellectual honesty 



THE INTELLECTUAL ACTIVITY 79 

must be desired for its own sake and not so 
that it may lead to moral honesty ; for there 
is no way to attain to it except by desiring 
it for its own sake. That is the law of the 
spirit, a law proved as constantly by expe- 
rience as any physical law. Therefore, in 
education the intellect should be taught to 
desire truth for its own sake, and all train- 
ing of the intellect should be subsidiary to 
this teaching. Knowledge itself is useless, 
or worse than useless, without the intellectual 
conscience. A man can make what he will 
of facts if he does not use them to discover 
the truth, if they are to him merely useful 
instruments for the accomplishment of some 
practical purpose. That, too, is proved to 
us by the immense learning and the present 
incredible perversity of Germany. For in 
Germany the official view of learning is that 
it should be all at the service of the State 
and of the designs of the State. 



80 THE ULTIMATE BELIEF 

In the past no nation has desired truth for 
its own sake more than the Germans; they 
were even laughed at for this high passion 
of theirs. But because they desired truth foi- 
its own sake they excelled all other nations 
in knowledge, and were able to perfect a 
wonderful machinery for the acquirement of 
it. Then came the perversion of this ma- 
chinery. Knowledge was to be used, not 
to discover the truth, but to support theories 
favourable to the designs of the State; and 
in a moment the knowledge ceased to be 
knowledge and became learned ignorance. 
For knowledge is always a means to an end, 
and that end the truth ; so that, without the 
desire for the truth, it is like the technique 
of an art used for some purpose not artistic, 
such as money-making — and the result, in 
both cases, is nonsense. 

But this fact should be constantly insisted 
upon in education, for, if it is not, the pupil 



THE INTELLECTUAL ACTIVITY 81 

sees no beauty or meaning in knowledge, 
since all its beauty and meaning come to it 
from that truth at which it aims. A boy 
who is taught knowledge without knowing 
the final reason why he should learn it comes 
to hate it. He sees no connection between 
the labour of learning it and that desire of 
the spirit for the truth which is certainly in 
him. Education should make him conscious 
of that desire and of its absolute value, and 
should show him the connection between that 
desire and what he is taught. And, further, 
if the teacher is always aware of that con- 
nection, he will himself have a principle, and 
the only right one, by which to test the value 
of the knowledge that he teaches, and he will 
teach it so as to make the connection always 
apparent to the pupil. We have one theory 
in education that learning is valuable as a 
discipline because it is disagreeable; another 
that it is only valuable when it is pleasant. 



82 THE ULTIMATE BELIEF 

Both these theories are really hedonistic ; for 
the first is merely a blind reaction from 
hedonism, and the second is a reaction from 
the first back into hedonism. We can escape 
from both and from the whole hedonistic 
fallacy only if we see that the proper aim 
of intellectual education is to satisfy the 
spiritual desire for truth as the proper aim 
of moral education is to satisfy the spiritual 
desire for goodness. A boy is to learn, not 
because learning is pleasant or unpleasant, 
but so that he may know the truth and so 
that his desire to know the truth for its own 
sake may be strengthened. At every turn 
the appeal must be to his intellectual con- 
science. Unless he learns thoroughly, he can 
never know the truth about anything; for 
thorough learning is itself an expression of 
the desire to know the truth, and inaccuracy 
means an indifference to the truth. But to 
make this plain to the pupil the teacher must 



THE INTELLECTUAL ACTIVITY 83 

himself have the intellectual conscience. He 
must express his own passion for the truth 
in all his teaching. That is to say, while he 
teaches others he must be teaching himself; 
with every repetition of a lesson he must be 
making it more clear to himself why he 
teaches it. That is the only way by which 
he can escape weariness for himself and for 
his pupils. He, too, must be always a 
learner; but the great difficulty of education 
is that those who wish to teach often do not 
care to learn; and those who wish to learn 
often do not care to teach. Only the man 
who sees that teaching is also learning can 
be a good teacher. 



THE AESTHETIC ACTIVITY 

T T is far more difficult to speak of the 
-"- aesthetic activity of the spirit than of the 
moral and intellectual, because neither its na- 
ture nor its importance is yet clearly under- 
stood. It is commonly supposed, for in- 
stance, that the aesthetic activity is only exer- 
cised in the production and experience of 
works of art. And so even those who believe 
that it must be exercised for its own sake, 
like the other spiritual activities, suppose 
that it plays a much smaller part in our lives 
than the other two activities. 

But most people do not believe that it 
must be exercised for its own sake. It is to 
them merely a source of pleasure, and they 

84 



THE ^ESTHETIC ACTIVITY 85 

think that the enjoyment of this pleasure is 
only justified as a means to some moral or 
intellectual end. This, again, they believe 
because they suppose that the aesthetic activ- 
ity is only concerned with works of art, and 
to them works of art are merely a source of 
pleasure. 

But we cannot understand either works of 
art or the nature and value of the sesthetic 
activity itself, unless we grasp the fact that 
works of art are only the most complete and 
conscious expression of that activity, and 
that we are, all our lives, constantly exercis- 
ing that activity without going so far as to 
produce works of art which can be experi- 
enced by others. In this respect the aesthetic 
activity exactly resembles the intellectual. 
There are men who write books in which they 
discover truth and communicate it to others. 
But the intellectual activity is not only exer- 
cised in the production of such books ; we are 



86 THE ULTIMATE BELIEF 

exercising it constantly in our ordinary lives ; 
and it is a part of our well-being to desire 
the truth and to discover it without commu- 
nicating it by means of the written word to 
others. Indeed, the desire for truth is a 
spiritual activity just because truth is de- 
sired for its own sake and without even the 
further aim of communicating it to others. 
The communication is not the essence of the 
activity. A man writes really to make the 
truth more clear to himself. It is his means 
of discovering the truth more precisely than 
he can discover it otherwise. And, having 
discovered it thus precisely, he communi- 
cates it to others because of the social in- 
stinct that is in all of us. But he must sat- 
isfy himself that it is truth before he wishes 
to communicate it at all. 

So it is with the aesthetic activity. That 
we all exercise and for its own sake. The 
work of art is a more precise exercise of it, 



THE .ESTHETIC ACTIVITY 87 

as writing is a more precise exercise of the 
intellectual activity. It means a more suc- 
cessful exercise, but it is not different in kind 
from the continual exercise of that faculty 
by men who produce no works of art and are 
not called artists. 

But, having said so much, we are still con- 
fronted with the great difficulty about the 
aesthetic faculty, the difficulty of defining it. 
The intellectual activity aims at knowing the 
truth. But what does the aesthetic faculty 
aim at? This difficulty has not yet been thor- 
oughly overcome; we are less conscious of 
our exercise of the aesthetic activity than of 
our exercise of the moral and intellectual; 
and therefore we are less aware of its nature 
and importance. 

We are aware, however, of our constant 
sense of what we call the beauty and ugliness 
of things. We say that things are beautiful 
or ugly, as we say that they are true or un- 



88 THE ULTIMATE BELIEF 

true, good or evil. And we say this not only 
of things that are beautiful or ugly to the 
eye. A thought, an action, may be beautiful 
or ugly to us, and that not merely by meta- 
phor. We exercise an aesthetic judgment 
about all things, which we know to be differ- 
ent from our moral or our intellectual judg- 
ment. We have an aesthetic value for all 
things, which we know to be different from 
our moral and intellectual values; and it is 
this value which we express when we use the 
words beautiful and ugly. Further, we 
know this value to be absolute, just like our 
moral and intellectual values. We do not 
value that which we call beautiful because 
it is true or because it is good, but because 
it is beautiful. Our sense of its beauty may 
be connected with our sense of its truth or 
goodness, but it is different. 

The aesthetic feeling can be clearly distin- 
guished from the moral or the intellectual, 



THE .ESTHETIC ACTIVITY 89 

and so the aesthetic value can be clearly dis- 
tinguished also. 

And the aesthetic value can be clearly dis- 
tinguished from the value of utility. An 
object, such as a chair or a coal scuttle, may 
be well designed for its purpose, and I may 
value it because it fulfils its purpose well. 
It may also be beautiful, and its beauty may 
be closely connected with its fulfilment of its 
purpose. I may value it aesthetically because 
I see that it does express its purpose in its 
whole design. Yet this aesthetic value is dis- 
tinct in itself from its practical value. Some 
one might value its utility just as much who 
saw no beauty in it at all. Further, we have 
an extreme aesthetic value for some things, 
such as music, which have no utility value 
whatever, nor have they any moral or intel- 
lectual value. People sometimes say that 
music has a moral value; but they say this 
because they suppose that we value things 



90 THE ULTIMATE BELIEF 

aesthetically only for the pleasure they give ; 
and when they find that they value music for 
something above pleasure, they conclude 
that they must value it morally. 

But they do not value it morally, because 
they do not value it for its effect upon their 
conduct. They value it for the state of mind 
which it produces in them; and that they 
value for its own sake. The arts stir the 
aesthetic activity within us; and we value 
them because they do so and because we 
value the aesthetic activity, like the moral and 
intellectual, for its own sake. 

This must be clearly understood or we 
shall be continually hampered in our exercise 
of the aesthetic activity. If we try to value 
a work of art, or any aesthetic experience of 
reality, for moral reasons, we shall miss the 
aesthetic experience. If we look at a sunset 
so that it may affect our conduct, we shall 
fail to experience it aesthetically, and it will 



THE ^ESTHETIC ACTIVITY 91 

not affect our conduct. For certainly our 
aesthetic activities, like our intellectual, do 
affect our conduct. Everything which af- 
fects our minds must affect our conduct. 
But they are aesthetic activities because they 
are exercised for their own sake ; and, unless 
we exercise them so, our minds are starved 
of their aesthetic activities, and our conduct 
suffers accordingly. There are sound moral 
reasons for exercising the aesthetic activity; 
but still it must be exercised for its own sake 
or it cannot be exercised at all. 

The work of art stirs us to aesthetic activ- 
ity because it is itself an exercise of aesthetic 
activity, just as philosophy stirs us to intel- 
lectual activity because it is itself an exercise 
of intellectual activity. But as reality stirs 
us to intellectual, so it stirs us to aesthetic 
activity ; and as the intellectual activity aims 
at the discovery of truth in the whole mass 
of our experience, so the aesthetic activity 



92 THE ULTIMATE BELIEF 

aims at the apprehension of what we call 
beauty. Beauty seems a vaguer word to us 
than truth because we cannot test our ap- 
prehension of beauty as we often can our 
discovery of truth, by some practical appli- 
cation of it. We can prove a theory to be 
true, we often say, because it works; that is 
to say, because we can apply it to some prac- 
tical aim and because it helps us to succeed 
in that aim. We cannot so apply our appre- 
hension of beauty ; and we cannot prove that 
anything is beautiful because it works. So 
we say that we are not so certain of beauty 
as of truth, and we suppose that the defini- 
tion of beauty is more difficult than the defi- 
nition of truth. Yet the moment an attempt 
is made to define truth, apart from its prac- 
tical results, the attempt fails just as com- 
pletely as the attempt to define beauty ; and 
so it is with the attempt to define goodness. 
But we are further hampered in our effort 



THE ^ESTHETIC ACTIVITY 93 

to understand beauty and the aesthetic activ- 
ity, because, whereas we know that truth is 
something that happens to our own minds as 
a result of our intellectual activity, we sup- 
pose that beauty is a quality of things which 
we see, just as we see that things are square 
or pink. But beauty, just like truth, is 
something that happens to our minds as a 
result of the exercise of the aesthetic activity. 
There is a glory of the universe which we 
call truth and which we discover or appre- 
hend, and a glory of the universe which we 
call beauty and which we discover or ap- 
prehend. Both glories are revealed to us 
through our power of seeing things or facts 
in a certain relation to each other; and we 
see them in one relation when we exercise 
the intellectual activity, and in another when 
we exercise the aesthetic. 

So, as the philosopher reveals truth to us 
by setting facts in a relation which he has ap- 



94 THE ULTIMATE BELIEF 

prehended or discovered, the artist reveals 
beauty to us by setting facts also in a rela- 
tion which he has apprehended or discovered. 
But the only final test of beauty or truth for 
us is our recognition of them, of this relation 
in which the glory of the universe is revealed 
to us; and our delight in both is always a 
delight in the revealed glory of the universe. 
Hence we often say that a work of art is 
true, because we recognise the glory of the 
universe in art as in truth; because we see 
that the relation to which the artist has at- 
tained is right, just as we see that the rela- 
tion to which the philosopher has attained 
is right, when we recognise the truth of what 
he says. 

But we must not, in talking thus of truth, 
confuse the aesthetic with the intellectual ac- 
tivities, or suppose that the aesthetic is sub- 
ordinate to the intellectual. The aesthetic 
activity discovers its own relation, the rela- 



THE ESTHETIC ACTIVITY 95 

tion of beauty, in things, which is not the 
intellectual relation of truth. And it discov- 
ers this relation for its own sake, for its own 
glory. The artist discovers it for us, whether 
in a representation of the real world or in 
an arrangement of material things, such as 
sounds, which represent nothing; but in both 
it is this glory of the universe which he dis- 
covers, this beauty which he apprehends and 
communicates to us in his work of art. And 
so we are always endeavouring to apprehend 
the same relation, the same glory in the uni- 
verse; and our aesthetic activity is an effort 
to apprehend it. The only difference be- 
tween us and him, or between us and the 
philosopher, is that he carries his apprehen- 
sion further and makes it more precise ; and 
this he does in the work of art as the philoso- 
pher does it in writing. Writing and the 
work of art are both an effort at greater pre- 
cision, at a more intense and concentrated 



96 THE ULTIMATE BELIEF 

and isolated intellectual or aesthetic activity. 
But the artist is an artist, the philosopher is 
a philosopher, for the same reason that we 
exercise our intellectual and aesthetic activi- 
ties on our own account, and not because 
they want to gain pudding or praise. 

They may make their living by the exer- 
cise of the aesthetic or intellectual activities, 
but that is only a fortunate accident for 
them. Most of us cannot make our living 
so; yet the spirit in us constantly desires to 
exercise these faculties, and is thwarted and 
troubled if it cannot exercise them. 

So we must not be taught to believe that 
these faculties are only to be exercised by 
artists and philosophers or that we ourselves 
turn to their works merely for diversion, and 
as we turn to games. We cannot apprehend 
truth and beauty in their works unless we 
also constantly exercise our own spiritual 
activities in apprehending truth and beauty 



THE AESTHETIC ACTIVITY 97 

in the universe. The philosopher and the 
artist only exist for us, their works only have 
any meaning for us, in so far as we ourselves 
exercise our intellectual and spiritual activi- 
ties. We can but recognise in these works 
the same glory which we have already recog- 
nised in the universe, only made clearer 
through the apprehension of the philosopher 
and the artist. Otherwise art and philosophy 
will be to us mere games played for their 
skill and enjoyed for their skill. They have 
reality for us only when we recognise in them 
what we also have experienced, only when 
they affirm to us a glory of the same nature 
as that which we have discovered for our- 
selves. 

Hence the value of art is not merely the 
value of works of art. It is the value of the 
aesthetic activity of the spirit, and we must 
all value that before we can value works of 
art rightly; and ultimately we must value 



98 THE ULTIMATE BELIEF 

this glory of the universe, to which we give 
the name of beauty when we apprehend it. 
For it is, ultimately, a glory of what is out- 
side us and not merely of our own mental 
processes. Our joy is not in the process of 
apprehension, but in what we apprehend. It 
is in discovering that which can be valued 
for its own sake, and in recognising that it 
is to be valued for its own sake, that it is 
good in itself. 

All the richness and health of our lives 
depend upon this discovery, this recognition. 
We live in our relation to the universe, and 
not merely in our effort to go on living. And 
this relation of ours is threefold, and must 
be threefold if it is to be right and sane. 
It is a moral relation — that is to say, a rela- 
tion of action — an intellectual relation, a re- 
lation in which we discover truth, and an 
aesthetic relation, in which we discover 
beauty. But the moral relation, the most 



THE AESTHETIC ACTIVITY 99 

active of the three, cannot be right unless 
it is prepared for by the other two, more 
passive, relations. We do, as it were, in our 
moral activity give out energy which we have 
taken in through our other spiritual activi- 
ties, just as, physically, we give out energy 
which we have taken in food and drink. In 
both cases the energy is transformed. But 
the fact remains that our intellectual and 
aesthetic activities must be pursued for their 
own sake, and not for their moral results; 
for otherwise they will not be intellectual and 
aesthetic. They justify themselves, and do 
not need a moral justification, yet they have 
a moral justification, just as the moral activ- 
ity has an aesthetic and an intellectual justi- 
fication. The three activities are on perfectly 
equal terms, and we cannot understand them 
or ourselves unless we recognise their equal- 
ity. 
So in education the absolute value of the 



100 THE ULTIMATE BELIEF 

aesthetic activity should be recognised, and 
that not merely in relation to works of art, 
but also in relation to the universe. A boy 
should be made to understand that when he 
perceives the beauty of anything, he is exer- 
cising an activity of the spirit, whether it 
be the beauty of nature or the beauty of art. 
He should be taught that to see beauty is not 
merely to amuse yourself, but to be aware 
of a glory of the universe, and that it is an 
end of life to be aware of this glory. 

Our education has failed aesthetically, per- 
haps, more than in any other respect because 
we are less aware of the absolute value of 
the aesthetic activity than of the absolute 
value of the other two activities of the spirit. 
It is not commonly believed that the aesthetic 
activity is an activity of the spirit at all. 
Rather it is supposed to be an amusement 
too effeminate and enervating for manly 
English boys. The ordinary teacher has 



THE AESTHETIC ACTIVITY 101 

been taught to undervalue it in himself, and 
he is therefore inclined to suppress it in his 
pupils. Yet the fact remains that it is an 
activity of the spirit, and that the spirit is 
thwarted and troubled if it cannot exercise 
all its activities. Hence our whole civilisa- 
tion suffers both morally and intellectually 
from the suppression of the aesthetic activ- 
ity. We have philistinism on the one hand, 
which is a stubborn denial of the value of 
that activity, and aestheticism on the other, 
which is a morbid exercise of it and a per- 
verse insistence upon its exclusive value. 
u^Estheticism is a reaction against philistin- 
ism, a reaction which is bound to occur when- 
ever the aesthetic activity is denied. There 
are boys in whom the aesthetic activity is too 
strong to be suppressed, and they commonly 
revolt against the exclusive insistence upon 
the moral activity. Often they think that 
there is something romantic and delightful 



102 THE ULTIMATE BELIEF 

in immorality, not because they are wicked, 
but because they see in morality as it is 
taught them a mere hindrance to the exer- 
cise of that other activity which their spirit 
desires. Morality, when it ousts the other 
activities of the spirit, does seem to them 
immoral, as indeed it is. It starves them, 
and they fly to the conclusion that the only 
way to richness and freedom is to deny the 
absolute value of the moral activity alto- 
gether. There they fall into the same error 
as their teachers, who deny the absolute value 
of the aesthetic activity; and their counter- 
denial is itself a fierce and perverse morality, 
an attempt to redress the balance. The doc- 
trine of art for art's sake in its last absurdity, 
when it asserts that man should live for art 
and for nothing else, is a moral doctrine and 
a declaration that ordinary morality is im- 
moral. It is a kind of aesthetic puritanism, 
asserting that man is purely an aesthetic 



THE .ESTHETIC ACTIVITY 103 

creature, as the puritan asserts that he is 
purely a moral creature. Both are wrong, 
and wrong because they are both in blind 
reaction against some other error. It is the 
function of education to preserve the pupil 
from all such reactions by teaching him the 
absolute value of all his spiritual activities, 
by making him understand that the aim of 
his life is to exercise them all, and to be 
aware of the glory of the universe in all three 
of its manifestations. Unless we exercise our 
aesthetic activity, the universe is not glorious 
to us. Science is a discovery of arid facts, 
and duty obedience to a set of rules. When 
Christ told His disciples to consider the lilies 
of the field, He assumed that they had seen 
their beauty, that they had exercised their 
sesthetic activity upon them. If they had 
not done so, His statement that Solomon in 
all his glory was not arrayed like one of 
these would have been meaningless. Solo- 



104 THE ULTIMATE BELIE!' 

mon's array must have been finer than theirs, 
because more costly, to anyone who did not 
see the greater beauty of the lilies, and who 
was not aware that this beauty was to be 
valued absolutely and not because of its sig- 
nificance in terms of something else. 

Love beauty for its own sake, and you 
will love it better than luxury, which you 
only value because it gives you comfort or 
heightens your importance. And this saying 
of Christ's is an assertion of the absolute 
value of beauty and the merely relative value 
of luxury. Christ's whole teaching, and the 
teaching of all true religion, is an assertion 
of absolute values. He tells us which are 
the things outside us that we are to value 
absolutely, and not in terms of something 
else, and among them is beauty. A man 
is living well when he forgets himself and 
all the demands of his own flesh in doing 
what is right for the love of what is right, 



THE AESTHETIC ACTIVITY 105 

and in seeking truth for the love of truth; 
but he is also living well when he forgets 
himself in seeking beauty for the love of 
beauty. This forgetfulness of self, of all the 
demands of the flesh, is what we live for; 
but we can only attain to it through the 
activities of the spirit, which put us into a 
right relation with the universe outside us. 

We are apt to think of love as if it were 
a merely moral feeling ; but love is the reali- 
sation of the absolute value of things outside 
us, which is attained to intellectually and 
aesthetically no less than morally. While we 
value things outside us in terms of our own 
well-being, we cannot love at all. For self- 
love is only a metaphor. Love is good, but 
self-love is bad; therefore it is not love. 
What we call self-love is merely a failure 
to love, a failure to see absolute value in 
what is outside ourselves. But when I love 
beauty or truth, I escape from self-love no 



106 THE ULTIMATE BELIEF 

less than when I love goodness. The human 
animal desires to escape from its animal 
prison by means of all kinds of love, by free- 
dom of emotion no less than of action or 
thought. And it attains to the freedom of 
emotion when it is aware of beauty. It can- 
not be aware of beauty except in self-forget- 
fulness, and it cannot produce beauty except 
in self-forgetfulness. There is in every hu- 
man being the passionate desire for this self- 
forgetfulness, and a passionate delight in it 
when it comes. The child feels that delight 
among spring flowers ; we can all remember 
how we felt it in the first apprehension of 
some new beauty of the universe, when we 
ceased to be little animals and became aware 
that there was this beauty outside us to be 
loved. And most of us must remember, too, 
the strange indifference of our elders. They 
were not considering the lilies of the field; 
they did not want us to get our feet wet 



THE ^ESTHETIC ACTIVITY 107 

among them. We might be forgetting our- 
selves, but they were remembering us; and 
we became suddenly aware of the bitterness 
of life and the tyranny of facts. Now par- 
ents and nurses and teachers have, of course, 
to remember children when they forget them- 
selves. But they ought to be aware that the 
child, when he forgets himself in the beauty 
of the world, is passing through a sacred 
experience which will enrich and glorify the 
whole of his life. Children, because they 
are not engaged in the struggle for life, are 
more capable of this aesthetic self-forgetful- 
ness than they will afterwards be ; and they 
need all of it that they can get, so that they 
may remember it and prize it in later years. 
In those heaven-sent moments they know 
what disinterestedness is. They have a test 
by which they can value all future experi- 
ence and know the dullness and staleness of 
worldly success. Therefore it is a sin to 



108 THE ULTIMATE BELIEF 

check, more than need be, their aesthetic de- 
light. Rather we should make them under- 
stand that this delight is to be valued for its 
own sake; and our schools should not be 
places in which they learn to be ashamed of 
it. The child naturally loves flowers; but 
the schoolboy thinks that it is childish to 
love them. He gives up for things of this 
world, of the school-world which is none the 
less worldly because it is quite artificial, all 
those joys of the spirit which made childhood 
wonderful to him ; and his masters often en- 
courage him to do this. They do not like 
the boy who has his secrets, even though they 
be secrets of the spirit. They want him "to 
play his part in the life of the place," which 
is a worldly life of rewards and punishments. 
He must do what pays; and while he does 
that, whether in work or in games, he is los- 
ing his sense of absolute values, that sense 
which it should be the chief aim of education 



THE AESTHETIC ACTIVITY 109 

to strengthen. Nearly every boy leaves 
school weaker in his aesthetic activity than 
when he went there, and so impoverished 
rather than enriched by his education. The 
delicacy of childhood is lost in the school- 
worldliness; the first lesson the boy learns 
there is to care for nothing for its own sake. 
He must care for what other boys like, and 
he must do that so that he may get on well 
with other boys, all of whom are also en- 
gaged in caring for what other boys like, 
and in losing their own sense of absolute 
values. 

This certainly is not all the fault of the 
masters; it is chiefly the fault of parents 
who send their children to school so that they 
may become boys of the world, not so that 
they may be educated. But the stand against 
this perverse ambition of parents must be 
made by schoolmasters. It is peculiarly their 
duty to understand the philosophy of the 



110 THE ULTIMATE BELIEF 

spirit and to imply it in all the lessons that 
they teach. There seems to come naturally 
a worldly and prosaic period in the life of 
the boy, a period in which he despises all his 
former childishness, and cares for nothing 
but getting on with other boys. In this pe- 
riod his aesthetic activity is often fatally 
checked. He dismisses the beauty of the 
universe as no concern of his; and often it 
never again becomes his concern. It ought 
to be one of the main objects of education 
to prevent this disaster ; but our present edu- 
cation rather encourages it, because we do 
not understand the importance of the aes- 
thetic activity, because we suppose it to be 
merely a source of pleasure, whereas it is an 
activity of the spirit without which the spirit 
can never be satisfied. 



CONCLUSION 

THERE is one very strong practical rea- 
son why children are not taught the 
philosophy of the spirit, and why that philos- 
ophy is not agreeable to teachers. The 
philosophy of the spirit implies the freedom 
of the spirit; and we are all afraid of free- 
dom in others, if not in ourselves ; especially 
are we afraid of it in the young. Thus, if 
we try to teach the young what is true, we 
naturally incline to tell them what is true, 
and to be angry if they doubt our knowledge 
of the truth. And this is not merely through 
self-love, but also because the young must 
accept what they are taught, or they will 
learn nothing. But the philosophy of the 
spirit insists that there is in everyone a de- 
sire for the truth which is to be encouraged 

ill 



112 THE ULTIMATE BELIEF 

in everyone ; and this desire for the truth is 
something very different from a readiness to 
believe what is taught. So, too, the desire to 
do what is right is something different from 
the readiness to obey. If I love truth for 
its own sake, or righteousness for its own 
sake, I shall prefer both to obedience; and 
I may be very inconvenient to a teacher 
whose aim is to make me obedient. I may 
also be inconvenient to myself, especially 
when I am young and inexperienced and 
have little sense of the relative importance 
of things. The boy Shelley had a passion 
for truth and for righteousness, and he was 
a trouble to himself and to others, especially 
to his father and his first wife. He was un- 
able to distinguish his passion for truth and 
righteousness from other passions less spir- 
itual; and it is this inability, very common 
in youth, which makes their elders deny them 
freedom. 



CONCLUSION 113 

We all have other passions besides our 
spiritual passions ; and it is a problem for all 
of us not to be mastered by these other pas- 
sions. It is also a problem for our teachers. 
They and our parents have the fear that we 
may "go to the bad"; and this fear, more 
than anything else, makes education difficult 
and the philosophy of the spirit unwelcome 
to teachers. 

Yet the philosophy of the spirit is true; 
and we cannot make education easier by 
ignoring its truth; we cannot teach well 
through fear, whether our own fear or the 
fear of the pupil. The best way to prevent 
a boy from going to the bad is to teach him 
to go to the good ; and he can only be taught 
to go to the good by those who know what 
good is. Obedience, in itself, is not good 
or bad ; the young must learn it only because 
they have to learn, and you cannot learn 
without obedience. But they should be made 



114 THE ULTIMATE BELIEF 

to understand that obedience is only a means 
to an end, and that end the freedom of the 
spirit to exercise its own proper activities. 
A boy cannot be taught what is good or true 
or beautiful. He can only be trained so 
that he may find out for himself what is 
good or true or beautiful, and so that his de- 
sires of the flesh may not overcome his desires 
of the spirit. 

The commonest error in education, per- 
haps, is the belief that a child is mere pas- 
sive material which, by means of obedience, 
can be made what the educator would make 
of it. That is not so. The child has certain 
desires of the flesh and certain desires of the 
spirit. Education cannot change these even 
by means of the most complete obedience. 
The most it can do is to establish a right 
relation between the desires of the flesh and 
the desires of the spirit, so that the desires 
of the spirit shall have freedom. And when 



CONCLUSION 115 

they have freedom, the pupil will be free of 
the teacher also. Therefore the teacher 
should have no "will to power" over the 
pupil. That will to power is merely the 
hen's anxiety when she sees her ducklings 
take to the water, if it is not a worse ego- 
tism. If you teach a child to pursue his spir- 
itual activities, you must teach him to pur- 
sue his own spiritual activities, not yours; to 
seek for what he sees as goodness, truth, and 
beauty, not for what you see. But you can 
do this only if you have faith in the spirit 
that is in everyone. It must be a dogma with 
you that there is this spirit in everyone, and 
a desire for goodness, truth, and beauty, 
which are to be found only through that de- 
sire. Without that dogma, you will merely 
try to impose upon your pupil the results of 
your own experience; your effort will be to 
enslave him to the past, not to give him the 
freedom of the future. 



116 THE ULTIMATE BELIEF 

Freedom is certainly dangerous ; but so is 
obedience, as the Germans are now proving. 
Nothing is so dangerous to the mind of man 
as a false absolute, and the false absolute 
of the Germans is Germany. But you can- 
not guard against a false absolute, whether 
it be your country, or money, or any kind of 
worldly success, or any pleasures of the flesh, 
except by knowing what are the true abso- 
lutes, what are those things which a man 
ought to desire for their own sake, which, 
indeed, his spirit does actually desire. And, 
if you know this, you must wish that every- 
one should have freedom of the spirit. 

At bottom our fear of freedom for the 
young is a fear of the sexual instinct and 
all its dangers. We teach our children obe- 
dience above all things so that, when they 
first approach the age of puberty, they may 
obey us and not their sexual instinct. We 
do not want them to think for themselves, 



CONCLUSION 117 

because we know that the sexual instinct, in 
its first blind power, may colour all their 
thoughts. It is all very well to talk of free- 
dom of the spirit; but when a boy first 
reaches the age of puberty his spirit is not 
free, just as the spirit of a hungry man is 
not free ; and he cannot, like the hungry man, 
have that satisfaction which would set his 
spirit free. The sexual instinct produces a 
strange confusion and mixture of the desires 
of the spirit and the desires of the flesh. In 
love they become one, and that is both the 
glory and the danger of love. 

But there is a long period in the life of 
the child, before he reaches the age of pu- 
berty, in which the desires of the spirit may 
be encouraged; and if they are so encour- 
aged, they will be his best safeguard against 
the dangers of the sexual instinct. Often 
the sexual instinct has a vast power over a 
boy's mind because it means mystery and 



118 THE ULTIMATE BELIEF 

romance in a thoroughly prosaic world ; and 
the world has become prosaic to him because 
all the desires of his spirit have been sup- 
pressed. He has learnt to care for games 
and the approval of other boys more than for 
truth or beauty, or even goodness. He has 
learnt to take everything at second-hand, 
even his notions of pleasure. He has lost 
all sense of reality, whether spiritual or ma- 
terial; and here is something entrancingly 
real which comes to him, something in which 
he is intensely his own individual self and not 
merely one of a crowd. And it is all the 
more real to him because it is a guilty secret, 
and one about which he can talk guiltily and 
with a new intimacy to other boys. 

But if his life before had not become un- 
real and second-hand, this new reality would 
not be so enthralling to him. It is not mere 
wickedness that causes boys to take what we 
call a prurient interest in their sexual in- 



CONCLUSION 119 

stinct. It is the reality of the sexual instinct 
that absorbs them ; and they will be absorbed 
in it unless they have already been made 
aware of spiritual realities. They will sur- 
render themselves to the animal objects of 
life rather than be objectless, if they have 
no notion already of the spiritual objects of 
life. To those whose sense of beauty is 
starved sensuality comes as a great glory, 
because it awakens their sense of beauty. 
There is to them something actually good in 
it because it opens their eyes to what they 
had not seen before; and no preaching will 
make them believe that it is bad. But if 
they have been long aware of beauty and of 
its absolute value, they will not yield to sen- 
suality as a revelation. If life is real to them 
already through the desires of the spirit, they 
will not be overcome by the force of this 
new physical reality. There is the romance 
of childhood, when the child becomes aware 



120 THE ULTIMATE BELIEF 

of the desires of the spirit ; and the romance 
of youth, when the youth becomes aware of 
the desires of the flesh. Between these two 
romances there is often a dull, worldly time 
in which the romance of childhood is dead, 
suppressed by education. But the object of 
education should be to prolong and encour- 
age the romance of childhood so that youth 
may not be utterly bewildered and overcome 
by its own romance. 

In our present materialistic society youth 
often is utterly overcome by its own romance, 
even when it remains perfectly respectable; 
and that because there is supposed to be no 
romance in life except this one sexual ro- 
mance of youth. Our arts are absorbed in 
that as if there were nothing else in the uni- 
verse that was not mere routine; and the 
one freedom that we glorify is the freedom 
of a man to choose the woman that he loves. 
There is no romance to us in the freedom 



CONCLUSION 121 

of the spirit, the freedom to pursue good- 
ness or truth or beauty for their own sake. 
Our notion is that when a youth has exer- 
cised his freedom of sexual selection he must 
settle down to business. He has had his 
fling, his moment of glory, his taste of dis- 
interested passion ; and after that he must do 
nothing for its own sake and everything for 
the sake of earning a living, and as plenteous 
a living as possible. 

But the romance of life is not exhausted 
by marriage for love. Love itself is only 
made romantic by that spiritual element in 
it which should persist and be strengthened 
through all the activities of a man's life ; and 
if a man only becomes aware of the spirit 
in sexual love, that is the fault of his educa- 
tion. He should have been aware of it long 
before he knew anything about sexual love 
except by hearsay. He should have been 
trained to be a lover all his life, of all the 



122 THE ULTIMATE BELIEF 

glory of the universe and not merely of that 
glory as it reveals itself to him in one female 
human being. There is a sense of the glory 
of the universe, a disinterested passion, in 
love which distinguishes it from lust. But 
do we only exist to propagate our species, 
and is love only lust made more alluring so 
that the earth may never be dispeopled? 
There are people who believe that, because 
the spiritual element in life is known to 
them only in love; because in this time of 
delightful madness, as it seems to them, they 
are aware of the spirit for the first and last 
time. But if, by education and the whole 
purpose and effort of society, they had been 
made aware of the spirit and its desires from 
early youth, love would be to them, not the 
one romance of their lives, but only one ex- 
ample of the continuing romance of life, the 
threefold romance of goodness, truth, and 
beauty. They would not exhaust themselves 



CONCLUSION 123 

once for all in this single paroxysm of disin- 
terestedness ; nor would they in later years 
look back upon "being in love" as an episode 
of divine foolishness to be envied and yet 
smiled at when it is repeated in their chil- 
dren. 

Education ought to teach us how to be in 
love always and what to be in love with. 
The great things of history have been done 
by the great lovers, by the saints and men 
of science and artists; and the problem of 
civilisation is to give every man a chance of 
being a saint, a man of science, or an artist. 
But this problem cannot be attempted, much 
less solved, unless men desire to be saints, 
men of science, and artists. And if they are 
to desire that continuously and consciously, 
they must be taught what it means to be 
these things. We think of the man of science 
or the artist, if not of the saint, as a being 
with peculiar gifts, not as one who exercises, 



124 THE ULTIMATE BELIEF 

more precisely and incessantly perhaps, ac-' 
tivities which we all ought to exercise. It 
is a commonplace now that art has ebbed 
away out of our ordinary life, out of all the 
things which we use ; and that it is practised 
no longer by workmen, but only by a few 
painters and sculptors. That has happened 
because we no longer recognise the aesthetic 
activity as an activity of the spirit and com- 
mon to all men. We do not know that when 
a man makes anything he ought to make it 
beautiful for the sake of doing so, and that 
when a man buys anything he ought to de- 
mand beauty in it, for the sake of that 
beauty. We think of beauty, if we think of 
it at all, as a mere source of pleasure; and 
therefore it means to us ornament added to 
things, for which we can pay extra if we 
choose. But beauty is not an ornament to 
life or to the things made by man. It is an 
essential part of both. The aesthetic activity, 



CONCLUSION 123 

when it reveals itself in things made by men, 
reveals itself in design, just as it reveals it- 
self in the design of all natural things. It 
shapes objects as the moral activity shapes 
actions; and we ought to recognise it in ob- 
jects and value it, as we recognise and value 
the moral activity in actions. And as actions 
empty of the moral activity are distasteful 
to us, so should objects be that are empty 
of the aesthetic activity. But this is not so 
with most of us. As we do not value the 
aesthetic activity in ourselves, so we do not 
value it, do not even recognise it or the lack 
of it, in the work of others. 

The artist, of whatever kind, is a man so 
much aware of the beauty of the universe 
that he must impart the same beauty to what- 
ever he makes. He has exercised his aesthetic 
activity in the discovery of beauty in the uni- 
verse before he exercises it in imparting 
beauty to that which he makes. He has seen 



126 THE ULTIMATE BELIEF 

things in that relation which is beauty before 
he can himself produce that relation in his 
own work, whatever it may be. And just as 
he sees that relation for its own sake, so he 
produces it for its own sake and satisfies the 
desire of his spirit in doing so. And we 
should value his work, we should desire that 
relation in all things made by man, if we, 
too, had the habit of seeing that relation in 
the universe, and if we knew that, when we 
see it, we are exercising an activity of the 
spirit and satisfying a spiritual desire. And 
we should know, also, that work without 
beauty means unsatisfied spiritual desire in 
the worker; that it is waste of life and a com- 
mon evil and danger, like thought without 
truth or action without righteousness. 

Once understand the philosophy of the 
spirit, and you will see that we are all con- 
cerned with each other's spiritual activities. 
iThe aim of civilisation is not to give a few 



CONCLUSION 127 

the leisure to exercise their intellectual 
and aesthetic activities, while the many are 
drudges, even if their drudgery saves them 
from actual want. We know that is true of 
the moral activity; we do not suppose that 
only the rich ought to be good. But it is 
true also of the other spiritual activities. 
And for this reason: that men exist so that 
they may exercise all their spiritual activities 
and not merely so that they may be good. 
All men are equal in that they have an equal 
right to spiritual activities; and the proper 
aim of society is to secure this equality, not 
merely to secure property to those who have 
it. 

This we need to be taught, since most of 
us certainly have never put it clearly to 
themselves. And if the young were taught 
it, they would see that every drudge is not 
merely a queer, stupid creature with manners 
and tastes utterly different from their own, 



128 THE ULTIMATE BELIEF 

but a human being prevented by the struggle 
for life from exercising those spiritual activi- 
ties that are the proper business of life. And 
if we had learnt to exercise our own spiritual 
activities and to value the exercise of them 
above all things, the drudgery of others 
would become intolerable to us. The chief 
moral problem for all of us would be to 
lessen that drudgery. 

Mr. Owen Wister, in his Pentecost of Ca- 
lamity, tells us how he was in Germany a 
few months before the war, and how much 
he was impressed by the orderly energy, the 
contentment, and the public spirit of the 
people. It seemed to him that, if he could 
have his choice, he would rather be a German 
than a Frenchman, an Englishman, or an 
American. And yet the Germans were then 
on the eve of their great crime. How was 
it possible for them to practise such high 
virtues and yet to pervert them all in a 



CONCLUSION 129 

moment ? It was possible because they had a 
wrong philosophy. The motive for all their 
energy and public spirit was not that they 
might all exercise their spiritual activities, 
but that Germany might be supreme among 
the nations. Their very spiritual activities, 
while they seemed to be exercised, were per- 
verted to this end. There was in their minds 
a fatal confusion of spirit and flesh, like that 
which produces the crimes of sexual infatua- 
tion. This confusion of spirit and flesh, by 
which a material end seems to be spiritual 
and usurps the absolute value of a spiritual 
end, is the cause of all the worst crimes of 
humanity because it perverts the very con- 
science; and there is no safeguard against 
it except the philosophy of the spirit. If the 
Germans had been taught what are the true 
absolutes, they would never have made a 
false absolute of Germany. 

But we need the philosophy of the spirit 



130 THE ULTIMATE BELIEF 

no less, although we have not fallen into 
their confusion of spirit and flesh or into 
their fatal infatuation. They have made a 
State that is a danger to the world, because 
the aim of that State is wrong ; but our State 
is aimless. They have used all the virtues 
for a material end, and have not seen that it 
was material; but we have left our virtues 
to chance. If they have a false absolute in 
their country, we have none at all, either true 
or false. There are people, not only Ger- 
mans, who believe that German Kultur 
might save the world, and who hope there- 
fore for a German victory. To them Ger- 
man Kultur is something positive, something 
in which men forget themselves for the State, 
and in doing so are raised above their natural 
powers; and they believe that the Germans 
could teach us all this secret of self-forget- 
fulness so that we should all do our work 
with German system and thoroughness. But 



CONCLUSION 131 

in us they find nothing positive at all; and 
we seem to them to be fighting merely for 
the hand-to-mouth methods of the past, and 
with those methods. 

They are wrong, no doubt ; we are at least 
fighting against a national egotism that the 
world would never endure, however much 
tidiness it might impose upon the world ; for 
with that tidiness it would impose slavery. 
But we need to make it clear to ourselves 
that we are fighting for a higher and more 
complete self-forgetfulness than the Ger- 
man. The Germans value Germany above 
all things; but what are we taught to value 
above all things? Our whole society suffers 
from a lack of values, from a bewildered 
worldliness that is not even content with it- 
self. There is hope in that discontent and 
bewilderment, more hope than in the deter- 
mined perversity of Germany; but neither 
discontent nor bewilderment is good in itself; 



im THE ULTIMATE BELIEF 

and they will lead nowhere unless we can find 
values, and the right values. The German 
defiance to the whole philosophy of the spirit 
has awakened in us a sense, at least, of the 
moral absolute; and for that moral absolute 
we are fighting, for that rich and poor are 
forgetting themselves and giving their lives. 
So we may hope that our sense of the other 
spiritual absolutes will be quickened ; and in 
that hope I have written this little book. 



THE END 



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